by Malcolm Knox
The constant shadow of death striking his loved ones, and his own fight with diabetes, on top of the usual turmoil of adolescence, drove Gagalowicz into chronic depression. He had to give up competitive basketball and football due to his diabetes, his previously good marks plummeted, and he began fighting with his teachers. Anyone who hadn’t known him before would have described him now as an unsociable, disruptive, surly boy—an extreme case of otherwise typical teenage behaviour. But Gagalowicz was in fact struggling with problems that even adults would have had trouble combating.
The gash in Gagalowicz’s psyche, was staunched, perhaps inevitably, by illicit drugs. He started smoking marijuana in his early teens; his smoking buddies were his only social outlet at school. He got his laughs when he was stoned; he talked about weed, he dreamt about it, and he configured his life around it. Pot helped him out of his depression, and then made it worse: by as early as fourteen or fifteen, Gagalowicz was locked into the habitual drug user’s spin cycle.
Anyone who uses a number of drugs will develop a preference. Among keen recreational users, desert island drugs are a favourite subject of conversation: If you could choose just one drug, which would it be? Matthew Gagalowicz found his desert island drug in 2000, at the age of sixteen, when one of his school friends gave him his first try of amphetamines.
This was a ‘clean’ amphetamine—some dexamphetamine the friend had been prescribed to cope with his attention deficit disorder. Unlike street amphetamines, dexamphetamine is not cut with who-knows-what impurities. When Gagalowicz took dexies, for the first time in memory he felt comfortable, light on his feet, confident and energetic. Smoking so much dope had begun to make him lethargic and paranoid, introverted and mostly miserable. Now he wasn’t feeling anxious about a thing. He felt supremely ‘normal’.
In year eleven he changed high schools. He only stayed at the new school for a short time, but it was long enough to make some new friends who introduced him to ecstasy and cocaine. Though he enjoyed these, dexamphetamine, or the more commonly available methamphetamine, remained his drug of first resort.
By 2001, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas would tell friends that they were emerging from a long, dark tunnel. Having two babies so close together was a challenge to their fitness and sanity, but the moments of joy outweighed the fatigue and sense of being a little old before their time. The friends they had made at their respective law firms since moving to Sydney tended not to have children, and Vicki and Mark spent most of 1998–2001 quietly envying their colleagues’ Friday-to-Sunday merry-go-round. Observing their friends’ party lifestyle was a form of nostalgia; Vicki and Mark mocked the shallowness, but also acknowledged that they missed it. A little shallowness once in a while might make a refreshing change.
In 2001, they took their first holiday away together without their daughters, whom they left in Melbourne with Mark’s parents. The girls were sleeping to a sound routine, waking up at a luxurious six-thirty in the mornings, and were generally a great deal easier; they were no longer toddlers.
So Mark and Vicki went back to Thailand, their old happy hunting ground, and lay on beaches for a week. They avoided situations where they might be tempted to take any drugs, let alone shabu, but they did find themselves talking about their past trips to Thailand, romanticising their golden days, almost daring each other to plunge back into a past that they weren’t absolutely sure they wanted to remain, simply, the past.
When they returned to Sydney they went to a party in Coogee. They were feeling rested and tanned, healthier than they’d been at any point since 1998. Everyone at the party told them how good they were looking.
Mark was quite drunk by about 10 pm, when he went to the toilet. It was occupied, so he waited outside the door. After a few minutes the door opened and a male face peeped out. It was Peter, a workmate of Vicki’s. He bobbled his eyebrows at Mark. Mark went in.
Peter and two other lawyers, one a barrister and the other from Vicki’s firm, made space for Mark. One of the guys was bent at the vanity tipping some crystals from a plastic bag into the ball-shaped end of what Mark recognised, like an old friend, as a pipe for smoking drugs. Without a word, the guy passed Mark the pipe and a metal lighter in the shape of a revolver.
‘Pow-pow!’ the guy said.
Mark declined—could they give him a minute?
He left the bathroom and found Vicki talking to someone in the kitchen. Like a caveman, Mark dragged his woman off by the wrist. Laughing, she went along.
It was the old mad rush they remembered, only more so. They only had two or three puffs each, then suddenly wanted to be out of the bathroom, away from the three lawyers, who were—unlike Mark and Vicki—strangely quiet and concentrated.
Mark felt that the top of his head had come off. The first words Vicki said were: ‘I remember this now.’ Mark’s eyes were dewy. She knew what he was remembering.
They stayed at the party for another three or four hours. They thought they’d given up dancing. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex on the floor of someone’s garage. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex twice or more in one night. They hadn’t.
And the next morning, there was no hangover, no comedown. This shabu was better than the old shabu. Mark and Vicki talked about it all the next day; it seemed there was nothing else of any great importance or excitement to talk about. And talking about it made them excited and horny again. They made love on the aphrodisiac memory of the previous night, and said, over and over, ‘How could we have forgotten how good this is?’ They meant the sex, but they also meant the drug.
In the following weeks, Vicki became friendlier at work with Peter and the other guy who’d been in the bathroom. Mark, through his law firm, manipulated one case so he could brief the barrister who’d been the source of the shabu at the Coogee party. Only the barrister didn’t call it shabu. He called it crystal.
Vicki and Mark used it again, about twice in the next six months, with their new friends. When they were on it, they loved to philosophise about it. Alcohol made them tired. Children also made them tired. Life had made them tired. So why would they use alcohol to relax? At this time in their lives, what they needed was a pick-me-up, not a depressant. It seemed they’d grown into this drug. When they were energetic youngsters they’d loved smoking dope or taking acid trips, but now they were so tired all the time, what they wanted from a drug was not a transcendent experience but a burst of energy. The best thing about crystal was that it affected them even after it had worn off; that is, it improved their sense of their own powers. Three years of parenting had depleted their vitality, but now they had it back, almost more than they needed.
In 2001, an Australian statistical milestone was passed. Noticed only in law enforcement circles at the time, its repercussions were not yet fully understood.
That year, nationwide drug arrests for amphetamine offences exceeded heroin arrests for the first time.
To put that into perspective, in three decades heroin supply, possession, trafficking and importation had grown into Australia’s number one drug menace. Heroin imports, mainly from Burma but also from Thailand, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia, set off a domino effect of crimes against property and people, family tragedies, overdoses, imprisonment and personal ruin. Australia’s distance from the coca-producing countries of South America had to a degree insulated it from the cocaine epidemic seen in the United States. Among the illicit drugs of addiction, in Australia heroin was king.
At the turn of the century, this changed quite abruptly. As a rule, nothing happens quickly in the illicit drugs world. Behaviour changes direction like the Queen Mary. But this change was, in relative terms, like the throwing of a switch.
A prolonged policing assault on Asian opium poppy production, the effects of the anti-opium policies of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and a concerted police/customs chokehold on the importation of heroin across Australian borders produced results on the street. The average price o
f heroin went up from $350 to $450 a gram in the capital cities. Meanwhile, its average purity dropped from 51 to 39 per cent. So junkies were paying 30 per cent more for 25 per cent less. Deaths from heroin overdoses in New South Wales fell by almost half in 2000, from 491 to 296. Non-fatal overdoses also dropped.
Politicians jockeyed to claim victory. Prime Minister John Howard and his health minister, Michael Wooldridge, extolled the virtues of heavier law enforcement in creating the heroin drought. (They had opposed the safe injecting room project in Sydney’s Kings Cross, which was also responsible for reducing the number of overdose deaths and the spread of blood-borne infections.)
Meanwhile, on the street, injecting drug users didn’t simply pack up their fixes and give up. As Rebecca McKetin points out, the sentinel groups ‘soak up whatever’s going around’. And what was going around was to have even more devastating consequences than heroin.
The NDARC Drug Trends studies in 2000 and 2001, which showed such good news on the heroin front, also suggested that this, like so many law-enforcement initiatives, was a zero-sum game. As the king of hard drugs died, another king stood up to claim its throne.
In New South Wales, the number of injecting drug users wasn’t actually falling. They were just changing their drug. The portion of injecting drug users who had used ice in the previous year rose from 7 per cent in 2000 to 35 per cent in 2001. The purity of police amphetamine seizures, which had bottomed out at around 5 per cent in the mid-1990s, had crept up to 14 per cent by 1999 and was now hitting 36 per cent. The price of methamphetamine, meanwhile, was stable or dropping—to as low as $25 for a shot in Sydney. Methamphetamine was even cheaper in South Australia and Victoria.
In the United States, the crystal meth epidemic had followed a clear geographic path through the 1990s. The Pacific Northwest and California, being closest to the supply chains of Asia and Hawaii—and, in California’s case, Mexico—felt it first. Texas was hit when the pseudoephedrine traffic started coming in from Mexico. But overall, ice’s journey in the mainland United States could be said to have started on the West Coast, in centres like Portland and San Francisco, and spread steadily eastwards.
In Australia, reports of ice seemed to flower simultaneously in all states. And it all happened in 2000–2001. As New South Wales usage rates among injecting drug users rose from 7 per cent to 35 per cent in that year, in Victoria it rose from 8 to 18 per cent, in South Australia 13 to 20 per cent, in Queensland from negligible up to 18 per cent and in the ACT from negligible up to 21 per cent. As it had in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, ice in Australia went everywhere at once.
Police and researchers could never answer precisely why this happened, but the strongest theory was quite simple: major illegal drug distribution in Australia is concentrated at the top. When the big importers couldn’t get heroin, they shifted to methamphetamine. The bikie gangs who organised on-the-ground distribution were unfussed: bikie gangs had long controlled the amphetamines manufacture and sale in Australia. And bikies were everywhere, in all states.
Dr Michael Dawson, a chemist at the University of Technology, Sydney, is a leading expert on the chemistry of methamphetamine. He says it is impossible to determine the origin of pseudoephedrine chemically—making it hard to know where the methamphetamine police capture is coming from.
‘It is not like plant-based drugs [such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin] where you can identify the origin,’ he says. ‘It’s been said that you can tell local pseudoephedrine from imported pseudoephedrine, but that’s bullshit.’
The big change, Dr Dawson says, was in the early 1990s from the P2P method, producing a 50-50 mix of left- and right-handed isomers, to the method that used pseudoephedrine to produce methamphetamine hydrochloride, entirely made up of the right-handed isomer. This happened simultaneously in Australia and overseas.
‘My back-of-the-envelope estimation is that more methamphetamine in Australia is imported than local,’ says Dr Dawson. ‘That’s just from the economics of it. A kilo of pure methamphetamine yields about 20 000 doses. To make it in Asia, where the big production centres are, and secrete one kilo in a shipment to Australia, doesn’t seem too difficult.’
By the age of 29, five years after moving to Australia, Darren Jason Blackburn had been homeless around western Melbourne for the best part of three years. He still wasn’t seeing doctors for his schizophrenia or taking any medication other than the alcohol he drank and marijuana he smoked.
Every now and then he landed a job. After one of several stints in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray, he found casual work loading containers for the dairy company Bonlac. With his cash wages topping up his dole cheques, Blackburn was able to buy his nightly two casks of wine and get quietly sozzled.
Or not quite quietly. On 12 December 2001 he was convicted, after a vicious fight with another man, for intentionally causing serious injury. He was sentenced to six months’ periodic detention, but didn’t turn up one day and was ordered to serve the remaining 69 days all at once. He also went to a detox centre when his drinking overwhelmed him. He did the course, but as soon as he came out he resumed his consumption of alcohol and drugs.
Blackburn’s downward spiral was accelerated by three significant events in 2001. First, he met Graham ‘Banjo’ Band. Thirty years Blackburn’s senior, Band was a disreputable old drunk who presented himself to Darren Blackburn as a kindred spirit. They lived together in a house in Seddon, in western Melbourne, and spent each night drinking.
Then Blackburn met Lyn Henry. Notwithstanding his deep-seated alcoholism and mental illness, his drug-taking and his sketchy employment, Blackburn remained a fairly robust, cocky and good-looking man, at least on the outside, and Henry fell in love with him. She moved in with him and Banjo Band, and, just as he had a few years earlier, Blackburn believed he could be saved by love.
But there were competing love interests. In 2001, he started becoming a frequent user of intravenous drugs such as heroin. He was also introduced to ice. He liked heroin, but it was hard to come by. He liked ice more, and it was cheap and plentiful. As Dr Peter McGeorge, the mental health director at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, would say a few years later, ice became the ultimate democratic drug—it was popular in the party scene, among white-collar professionals who liked a weekend buzz, and also, because it cost $50 a point (a shot of one-tenth of a gram), it found favour with the homeless. For the first time in years, Darren Blackburn felt that his luck was coming good.
It’s not as if the consequences of the heroin drought hadn’t been foreseen. By 2000, Australia was a client state on the doorstep of the world’s biggest producers. We have seen how by 1997 methamphetamines were a bigger problem than opiates in Thailand. In 1998, the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence reported that Indonesia was threatening as a base for ice export to Australia.
So it proved with actual seizures. The 971 grams of amphetamines seized by Australian Customs in 2000–2001 surged to 305 kilograms the next year. In the following years the seized amounts were 6 kilos, 6 kilos, 157 kilos and 90 kilos. And that was only what was being intercepted at the borders. Police seizures of ice inside Australia rose phenomenally, from one kilo in 1998–99 to 6 kilos in 1999–2000, 80 kilos the next year, 150 kilos the next, and 225 kilos in 2002–03.
These figures were distorted by big single busts, some of which were spectacular or newsworthy. In March 1999, an unemployed seventeen-year-old youth was arrested in Sydney over the delivery of 238 grams of methamphetamine, packed into children’s toys, from south-east Asia. He was connected to an identical package, with 331 grams of the drug, left at a courier firm near Sydney Airport. That was the size of bust that made the news in 1999. In April 2000, a joint operation of the Australian Federal Police and Hong Kong police caught an Australian and a Hong Kong national about to send 20 kilograms of methamphetamine in a shipping container to Australia. In October 2000, Henry Sutanto, a heroin-using ‘pit boss’ at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, was arrested
after trying to on-sell half a kilogram of ice that he had bought from an Indonesian national named Henry Lu. Sutanto was trying to make money to finance his upcoming wedding.
These busts were small-time compared with what was to come. In November 2000, Australian Federal Police intercepted 79 kilograms of methamphetamine bound for Sydney from China. By a factor of ten, it was the AFP’s biggest ice interception to that point. The drug was found in a container alongside 184 kilograms of heroin, fuelling the theory that heroin and methamphetamine were passing through the same hands from Asia into Australia.
In the following year, that record seizure was doubled again, with police impounding 152 kilograms of methamphetamine in a yacht off Mooloolaba, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. It seemed that the constriction of heroin supply didn’t make much difference to the south Asian syndicates. Ice production was booming in Thailand, so the traffickers simply filled the bags with the more easily produced, less risky substance.
One of the first authoritative Australian voices to join the dots between the ice flood and the heroin drought was Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Sydney. In November 2001, Wodak warned publicly that the switch from heroin to methamphetamine among injecting drug users would lead to a spike in HIV infections. He knew the psychology of the stimulant user, as opposed to the narcotic. As Paul Bennett puts it, opiates take you downtown and meth takes you uptown. Wodak knew, better than most, that heroin users shot up and nodded off. While on the drug, heroin users are fairly sedate. While high on meth, the ice user would be running around, full of manic energy, dreading the depressing comedown, easily persuaded to top up again and keep going.